Poverty's Deadly Toll: 14 Children Buried Under the Weight of Neglect in Lahore's Kahna

In a locality tucked into the outskirts of the very constituency Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif represents, NA-123, fourteen children — none older than 12 — were buried this week not by fate, but by decades of official neglect.
It happened in the late afternoon. A modest home, doubling as a tuition centre, was hosting more than 25 children for their daily lessons when the roof above them gave way. Witnesses say renovation work was underway on the upper floor — the husband of the teacher who ran the centre was reinforcing the roof ahead of the monsoon season. The structure, weak and unable to bear the additional load, collapsed onto the children below.
By the time rescue teams and neighbours cleared the rubble, 14 children were dead and eight more injured, several critically. Some were rushed first to the nearby Tehsil Headquarters Hospital, then transferred to Lahore General Hospital as authorities scrambled to respond.

A Mother's Desperate Run

I visited Kahna to film an episode of my show, Banam Sarkar, and what I found there will stay with me long after the cameras stopped rolling.
One neighbour, a woman living in conditions no different from the family that lost so much, told me she ran toward the site the moment she heard the roof had fallen. She described watching a man pull a little girl from the debris — alive. Desperate to help, the woman ran home for water. By the time she returned, the child was gone.
She showed me where she lives: an unfinished house with a makeshift kitchen, no gas connection, cooking over a stove fueled by cow dung. And yet, she told me, her hope for her daughters remains undimmed — one of them is currently pursuing her intermediate studies at a nearby college. It was a rare point of light in an otherwise devastating visit.

Parents Who Never Imagined Goodbye

The parents I met had sent their children to this tuition centre for one reason: to give them a chance at something better. They had no way of knowing it would be the last time they saw their children alive.
I sat with grieving fathers and mothers as they described receiving the phone calls that upended their lives — a call telling them the roof had collapsed, that their children were trapped underneath. I could not hold back my own tears listening to them. No parent should have to bury a child who simply went to study.

A Community Failed by the System

Kahna is a labourer's neighbourhood — modest homes, tight finances, families who work hard and hope harder for their children's futures. It sits within NA-123, the parliamentary constituency of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif himself. That proximity to power makes the state of these homes and the fate of these children all the more difficult to reconcile.
Police have since registered a case and taken several people into custody, including the building's owner, citing alleged negligence and unsafe construction practices. But arrests will not undo what has already happened.

The Real Culprit: Poverty

Government officials have expressed sorrow. Statements have promised transparent investigations and accountability. These are words we have heard before, after other collapses, other tragedies, in other corners of this country.
But walking through Kahna, meeting families who cook on cow dung because they cannot afford gas, who send their children to study in structurally unsound buildings because that is what they can afford — the real culprit becomes impossible to ignore. It is not one negligent contractor or one weak roof. It is poverty that leaves families with no safer alternative, and a state that has yet to make good on its promises to the people who need it most.
Fourteen children are gone. The government says it is doing so much. Kahna is proof that much more remains undone.